Lightweight clients consult full clients to send and receive transactions without requiring a local copy of the entire blockchain (see simplified payment verification – SPV). This makes lightweight clients much faster to set up and allows them to be used on low-power, low-bandwidth devices such as smartphones. When using a lightweight wallet, however, the user must trust the server to a certain degree, as it can report faulty values back to the user. Lightweight clients follow the longest blockchain and do not ensure it is valid, requiring trust in miners.[96] Ethereum was initially described in a white paper by Vitalik Buterin,[10] a programmer involved with Bitcoin Magazine, in late 2013 with a goal of building decentralized applications.[11][12] Buterin had argued that Bitcoin needed a scripting language for application development. Failing to gain agreement, he proposed development of a new platform with a more general scripting language.[4]:88
بروتوكول التوجيه بين البوابات (BGP) بروتوكول التهيئة الآليّة للمضيفين (DHCP) بروتوكول التطبيقات المقيدة (CoAP) نظام أسماء النطاقات (DNS) بروتوكول نقل النصّ الفائق (HTTP) بروتوكول الوصول إلى رسائل الإنترنت (IMAP) بروتوكول النفاذ إلى الدليل البسيط (LDAP) برتوكول نقل أخبار الشبكة (NNTP) بروتوكول التوقيت في الشبكة (NTP) بروتوكول مكتب البريد (POP) بروتوكول معلومات التوجيه (RIP) بروتوكول التدفق في الزمن حقيقي (RTSP) بروتوكول وصف الجلسة (SDP) بروتوكول بدء جلسة (SIP) بروتوكول نقل الملفات (FTP) بروتوكول نقل الملفات البسيط (TFTP) بروتوكول إرسال البريد البسيط (SMTP) بروتوكول إدارة الشبكات البسيط (SNMP) بروتوكول الاتصال الآمن (SSH) بروتوكول تل نت (Telnet) سبيدي (SPDY) مزيد ..
Another type of physical wallet called a hardware wallet keeps credentials offline while facilitating transactions.[106] The hardware wallet acts as a computer peripheral and signs transactions as requested by the user, who must press a button on the wallet to confirm that they intended to make the transaction. Hardware wallets never expose their private keys, keeping bitcoins in cold storage even when used with computers that may be compromised by malware.[99]:42–45 Mining is a record-keeping service done through the use of computer processing power.[e] Miners keep the blockchain consistent, complete, and unalterable by repeatedly grouping newly broadcast transactions into a block, which is then broadcast to the network and verified by recipient nodes.[75] Each block contains a SHA-256 cryptographic hash of the previous block,[75] thus linking it to the previous block and giving the blockchain its name.[7]:ch. 7[75] The unit of account of the bitcoin system is a bitcoin. Ticker symbols used to represent bitcoin are BTC[a] and XBT.[b][72]:2 Its Unicode character is ₿.[1] Small amounts of bitcoin used as alternative units are millibitcoin (mBTC), and satoshi (sat). Named in homage to bitcoin's creator, a satoshi is the smallest amount within bitcoin representing 0.00000001 bitcoins, one hundred millionth of a bitcoin.[2] A millibitcoin equals 0.001 bitcoins; one thousandth of a bitcoin or 100,000 satoshis.[73]

According to the European Central Bank, the decentralization of money offered by bitcoin has its theoretical roots in the Austrian school of economics, especially with Friedrich von Hayek in his book Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined,[127] in which Hayek advocates a complete free market in the production, distribution and management of money to end the monopoly of central banks.[128]:22

Ethereum has recently created a new standard called the ERC721 token for tracking unique digital assets. One of the biggest use cases currently for such tokens is digital collectibles, as the infrastructure allows for people to prove ownership of scarce digital goods. Many games are currently being built using this technology, such as the overnight hit CryptoKitties, a game where you can collect and breed digital cats.

In Ethereum all smart contracts are stored publicly on every node of the blockchain, which has costs.[57] Being a blockchain means it is secure by design and is an example of a distributed computing system with high Byzantine fault tolerance. The downside is that performance issues arise in that every node is calculating all the smart contracts in real time, resulting in lower speeds.[57] As of January 2016, the Ethereum protocol could process about 25 transactions per second.[57] In comparison, the Visa payment platform processes 45,000 payments per second leading some to question the scalability of Ethereum.[58] On 19 December 2016, Ethereum exceeded one million transactions in a single day for the first time.[59] • الطبيعة الإنكماشية لعُملات البيتكوين: كما ذُكر أيضاُ عبر موقع الفتاوى أن عُملات البيتكوين مثلها مثل أى عُملة آخرى لها طبيعة إنكماشية. نقصد بالطبيعة الإنكماشية هو التذبذب في الأسعار ما بين إرتفاع للقيمة السعرية وإنخفاض للقيمة السعرية بُناء على الحالة الإقتصادية العالمية ومدى إقبال الجمهور المُتعامل معها على شراء أو بيع العُملة. وهذا يدل على مصداقية العُملة وخضوعها لتغيرات السوق والعُملاء مثلها مثل سوق الذهب بالضبط. تُعتبر بيتكوين عُملة معمّاة (بالإنجليزية: cryptocurrency) ويُقصد بذلك أنها تعتمد بشكل أساسي على مبادئ التشفير في جميع جوانبها، كما أنها تُعتبر أيضا العُملة الأولى من نوعها والأكثر شهرة وانتشارًا لكن رغم ذلك ليست العُملة التشفيرية الوحيدة الموجودة على شبكة الإنترنت حاليًا. حيث يتوفر ما يزيد عن 60 عُملة تشفيرية مُختلفة[6] منها 6 عُملات يُمكن وصفها بالرئيسية [7] وذلك اعتمادًا على عدد المُستخدمين وبنية كل شبكة، إضافة إلى الأماكن التي يُمكن استبدال وشراء هذه العُملات التشفيرية مُقابل عُملات أخرى. جميع العُملات التشفيرية الحالية مبنية على مبدأ عمل عُملة بيتكوين نفسها باستثناء عُملة Ripple [8]، وبما أن عُملة بيتكوين مفتوحة المصدر فإنه من المُمكن استنساخها وإدخال بعض التعديلات عليها ومن ثم إطلاق عُملة جديدة. Transactions are defined using a Forth-like scripting language.[7]:ch. 5 Transactions consist of one or more inputs and one or more outputs. When a user sends bitcoins, the user designates each address and the amount of bitcoin being sent to that address in an output. To prevent double spending, each input must refer to a previous unspent output in the blockchain.[77] The use of multiple inputs corresponds to the use of multiple coins in a cash transaction. Since transactions can have multiple outputs, users can send bitcoins to multiple recipients in one transaction. As in a cash transaction, the sum of inputs (coins used to pay) can exceed the intended sum of payments. In such a case, an additional output is used, returning the change back to the payer.[77] Any input satoshis not accounted for in the transaction outputs become the transaction fee.[77]
In 2014, researchers at the University of Kentucky found "robust evidence that computer programming enthusiasts and illegal activity drive interest in bitcoin, and find limited or no support for political and investment motives".[134] Australian researchers have estimated that 25% of all bitcoin users and 44% of all bitcoin transactions are associated with illegal activity as of April 2017. There were an estimated 24 million bitcoin users primarily using bitcoin for illegal activity. They held $8 billion worth of bitcoin, and made 36 million transactions valued at $72 billion.[225][226]

Bitcoin is pseudonymous, meaning that funds are not tied to real-world entities but rather bitcoin addresses. Owners of bitcoin addresses are not explicitly identified, but all transactions on the blockchain are public. In addition, transactions can be linked to individuals and companies through "idioms of use" (e.g., transactions that spend coins from multiple inputs indicate that the inputs may have a common owner) and corroborating public transaction data with known information on owners of certain addresses.[120] Additionally, bitcoin exchanges, where bitcoins are traded for traditional currencies, may be required by law to collect personal information.[121] To heighten financial privacy, a new bitcoin address can be generated for each transaction.[122]

^ "Crib Sheet: Neptune's Brood – Charlie's Diary". www.antipope.org. Archived from the original on 14 June 2017. Retrieved 5 December 2017. I wrote Neptune's Brood in 2011. Bitcoin was obscure back then, and I figured had just enough name recognition to be a useful term for an interstellar currency: it'd clue people in that it was a networked digital currency. Vitalik Buterin picked the name Ethereum after browsing Wikipedia articles about elements and science fiction, when he found the name, noting, "I immediately realized that I liked it better than all of the other alternatives that I had seen; I suppose it was the fact that sounded nice and it had the word 'ether', referring to the hypothetical invisible medium that permeates the universe and allows light to travel."[9]
• الطبيعة الإنكماشية لعُملات البيتكوين: كما ذُكر أيضاُ عبر موقع الفتاوى أن عُملات البيتكوين مثلها مثل أى عُملة آخرى لها طبيعة إنكماشية. نقصد بالطبيعة الإنكماشية هو التذبذب في الأسعار ما بين إرتفاع للقيمة السعرية وإنخفاض للقيمة السعرية بُناء على الحالة الإقتصادية العالمية ومدى إقبال الجمهور المُتعامل معها على شراء أو بيع العُملة. وهذا يدل على مصداقية العُملة وخضوعها لتغيرات السوق والعُملاء مثلها مثل سوق الذهب بالضبط. The overwhelming majority of bitcoin transactions take place on a cryptocurrency exchange, rather than being used in transactions with merchants.[138] Delays processing payments through the blockchain of about ten minutes make bitcoin use very difficult in a retail setting. Prices are not usually quoted in units of bitcoin and many trades involve one, or sometimes two, conversions into conventional currencies.[32] Merchants that do accept bitcoin payments may use payment service providers to perform the conversions.[139] Vitalik Buterin picked the name Ethereum after browsing Wikipedia articles about elements and science fiction, when he found the name, noting, "I immediately realized that I liked it better than all of the other alternatives that I had seen; I suppose it was the fact that sounded nice and it had the word 'ether', referring to the hypothetical invisible medium that permeates the universe and allows light to travel."[9] According to the European Central Bank, the decentralization of money offered by bitcoin has its theoretical roots in the Austrian school of economics, especially with Friedrich von Hayek in his book Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined,[127] in which Hayek advocates a complete free market in the production, distribution and management of money to end the monopoly of central banks.[128]:22